Book Insider: Writing from postcommunist Romania in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Perhaps we should be in a revolutionary frame of mind all the time, never calming down, never admitting our personal weaknesses, never putting up with the lie of comfort and easiness that are always at hand.” - Irina Morpurgo, Letter Home in a Foreign Language. The Review of Contemporary Fiction was Founded in 1981 and published by Dalkey Archive Press to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popular attention continue to be written about and discussed. A collection of short stories and essays by some of the greatest contemporary Romanian writers - and featuring such acclaimed authors as Andrei Codrescu and Dumitru Tsepeneag - this special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction ( Spring 2010 - Vol. XXX, No.1 ), edition and translation partially funded by the University Of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, the Translation and Publication Support Program of the Romanian Cultural Institute, and by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council - focuses on the realities of living and writing in Romania under communism, and then the often painful, often peculiarly comic transition to a different way of life after the fall of Ceausescu. Alexandru Vlad offers in Double Rainbow a definition for the urge Romanians feel to write about communism, although for some it is merely present in their childhood memories: “… in mathematics, when you add one unit, and then subtract it, you aren’t left with the same figure you started out with – you feel the absence of the addition.” “Leaving behind your kin, your friends, your language, your smells, your childhood, is traumatic. It’s a kind of death. You’re dead for the home folk and they are dead to you.”, concludes Andrei Codrescu, writing about his emigration to America. Still, they will not subside to this death and will raise their voices to share their grief of having left, but also the joy of having been born a Romanian. Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1966 and became a U.S. citizen in 1981. He is a poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, and lecturer, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Letters & Life. He is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio and winner of the Peabody Award for the film “Road Scholar.” He received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for poetry, and editing, the Romanian Literature Prize, the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, and the Ovidius Prize. But the value of this volume lies not solely in the selected pieces, but also in the translations provided. Exceptional work has a way of somehow rising to the surface, beyond national borders. A number of extraordinary translators like Patrick Camiller, Julian Semillian, Jim Brown, Georgiana Galateanu-Farnoaga and many others, have come together to make their voice heard, a literary community that have been slowly moving toward the reconstruction of a more stable environment for itself, one that will encourage meaningful development. More about the magazine